How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying America

In the disquieting new film “Eddington,” the director, Ari Aster, captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present. As a Covid-era New Mexico town tears itself apart over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter and conspiracy theories, a faceless conglomerate constructs a data center nearby — a physical manifestation of our tech-dominated future. It’s an unsubtle message: Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.

In the chaos depicted, Donald Trump is both offscreen and omnipresent. Over the decade that he has dominated our politics, he has been both a cause and a symptom of the unraveling of our society. His rise depended upon the marriage of unbridled capitalism and unregulated technology, which allowed social media to systematically demolish our attention spans and experience of shared reality. And he embodied a culture in which money is ennobling, human beings are brands, and the capacity to be shamed is weakness.

Today, his takeover of our national psyche appears complete. As “Eddington” excruciatingly reminds us, the comparatively moderate first Trump administration ended in a catastrophically mismanaged pandemic, mass protests and a violent insurrection. The fact that he returned to power even after those calamities seemed to confirm his instinct that America has become an enterprise with a limitless margin for error, a place where individuals — like superpowers — can avoid the consequences of their actions. “Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” he said in his Inaugural Address. “But as you see today, here I am.”

Here I am. The implicit message? When we looked at Mr. Trump onstage, we saw ourselves.

Unsurprisingly, the second Trump administration has binged on short-term “wins” at the expense of the future. It has created trillions of dollars in prospective debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of A.I. and denied the scientific reality of global warming. It has ignored the math that doesn’t add up, the wars that don’t end on Trump deadlines, the C.E.O.s forecasting what could amount to huge job losses if A.I. transforms our economy and the catastrophic floods, which are harbingers of a changing climate. Mr. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow.

Democrats are also trapped in this short-termism. Opposition to each action Mr. Trump takes may be morally and practically necessary, but it also reinforces his dominance over events. Every day brings a new battle, generating outrage that overwhelms their capacity to present a coherent alternative. The party spends more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place. The public stares down at phones instead of looking to any horizon.

We are all living in the disorienting present, swept along by currents we don’t control. The distractions abound. The data centers get built. And we forget the inconvenience of reality itself: Mr. Trump may be able to escape the consequences of his actions; the rest of us cannot.

This crisis of short-termism has been building for a long time.

In the decades after World War II, the Cold War was a disciplining force. Competition with the Soviets compelled both parties to support — or at least accept — initiatives as diverse as the national security state, basic research, higher education, international development and civil rights. Despite partisan differences, there was a long-term consensus around the nation’s purpose.

With the end of the Cold War, politics descended into partisan political combat over seemingly small things — from manufactured scandals to culture wars. This spiral was suspended, briefly, to launch the war on terror — the last major bipartisan effort to remake government to serve a long-term objective, in this case a dubious one: waging a forever war abroad while securitizing much of American life at home.

By the time Barack Obama took office, a destabilizing asymmetry had taken hold. Democrats acquiesced to the war on terror, and Republicans never accepted the legitimacy of reforms like Obamacare or a clean-energy transition. Citizens United v. F.E.C. led to a flood of money in politics, incentivizing the constant courting of donors more intent on preventing government action than encouraging it. The courts were increasingly politicized. The internet-driven fracturing of media rewarded spectacle and conspiracy theory in place of context and cooperation. Since 2010, the only venue for major legislation has been large tax and spending bills that brought vertiginous swings through the first Trump and the Biden administrations.

The second Trump administration has fully normalized the ethos of short-termism. Mr. Trump does have an overarching promise about the future. But it is rooted in what he is destroying, not what he is building. By dismantling the administrative state, starving the government of funds, deregulating the economy, unraveling the international order, punishing countries with arbitrary tariffs and whitening the nation through mass deportations, he will reverse the globalization that has shaped our lives and the government that was built during the Cold War. On the other side of this destruction, he says, a new “golden age” awaits.

Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley, worries that Democrats fail to understand the resonance of this vision. “We see all the destruction,” he told me, “but what we’re not seeing is that for the Trump voter, this is a strategy of reclaiming greatness.”

Precisely because this is correct as a political diagnosis, Democrats must convey how Mr. Trump’s approach is more of a pyramid scheme than a plan. Cuts to research will starve innovation. Tariffs are likely to drive trade to China. Tax cuts will almost certainly widen inequality. Mass deportations predictably divide communities and drive down productivity. The absence of international order risks more war. Deregulation removes our ability to address climate change and A.I. Mr. Trump is trying one last time to squeeze some juice out of a declining empire while passing the costs on to future generations. Beyond the daily outrages, that is the reality that Democrats must contend with.

“The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci wrote in another era of destruction, “and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” We may be fated to live in such a time. But what new world will be born after this time?

Yes, in the short-term, Democrats must mobilize to ensure that we still have a democratic foundation to build upon on the other side. Yet their animating purpose should be to imagine, and then build, what will come after.

During the Kennedy-Johnson era, a youthful president and his successor forged a vision expansive enough to encompass desegregation, a stronger social safety net, investments in education, the creation of U.S.A.I.D. and the Peace Corps and the ascent of the space program. It was undercut by political violence and the moral and practical costs of Vietnam, yet it shaped our society so comprehensively that Republicans are still seeking to reverse it. Those advances depended not just on action by government, but also the transformative participation of the civil rights movement, business and labor, universities and a media and popular culture that did not shy from politics or capitulate to reactionary forces. It was a whole-of-society fight for the future.

Today, change similarly depends upon leaning into discomfort instead of avoiding division or offering false reassurance. Democrats must match the sense of crisis many Americans feel. Mr. Khanna summarized concerns that plague far too many Americans: “I don’t see myself in this future” and “What’s going to happen to my kids?” That existential crisis was the reason Mr. Trump was returned to power; his opposition needs to meet it.

This is not about skipping ahead to the fine points of policy proposals; it’s about a coherent vision. Instead of simply defending legacy programs, we should be considering what our social safety net is for. We should attack wealth inequality as an objective and propose solutions for deploying A.I. while protecting the dignity of human work and the vitality of our children. We need to envision a new immigration system, a clean-energy transition that lowers costs for consumers and a federal government that can once again attract young people to meet national challenges. Think of what a new Department of Education or development agency could do. We can no longer cling to a dying postwar era; we need to negotiate a new international order.

Under President Joe Biden, Democrats did take bold steps to confront climate change, promote manufacturing and invest in technology. Yet the sum felt less than the parts because legislation wasn’t accompanied by communication across the country, the mobilization of different sectors of society or an instinct for the mood of a restive and anti-establishment electorate. Unlike Mr. Trump, Democrats have been reluctant to alienate big donors, stand behind controversial positions or abandon language that polls well but sounds hopelessly inauthentic. The party has appeared to grow older, lethargic and less culturally relevant.

Even when presented with Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York — an innovative example of fresh political tactics and policies — many party leaders recoiled. The party seems — quite literally — afraid of its own future. It is past time for Democrats to do what Mr. Mamdani did in his campaign: get out in communities. Don’t live in fear of bad-faith attacks. Mine cities and state legislatures for new ideas. Enlist civil society, faith groups, beleaguered universities and industry in envisioning an alternative future. Abandon campaign financing that makes you beholden to donors who make you hypocrites. Make a concerted effort to facilitate generational change, so that the faces of the party are younger, different and more diverse.

Ben Rhodes, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made.”

Source image by Caspar David Friedrich

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